Golfers routinely spend hours hitting practice golf balls in order to improve their swing and/or perfect the use of a certain club. In typical driving range operations, the golfer gets a bucket of balls and must repeatedly loose his grip and move his feet in order to tee a ball for each successive shot. Since even a small change in grip or stance can alter a successive shot, the golfer's ability to learn from each shot and adjust the aspect of their swing accordingly is rendered more uncertain. Any device that would allow the golfer to eliminate at least some of the variables involved in golfing would allow the golfer to learn much more about their own swing and what adjustments are necessary to improve their game.
In responding to this need, U.S. Pat. No. 5,356,148 to Elder, Jr. describes a simplified mechanism for automatically teeing practice golf balls that utilizes a vertically oriented pneumatic cylinder mounted below ground with a tee attached to one end. A hopper containing a plurality of golf balls opens to the pneumatic cylinder below ground and provides another golf ball with each retraction of the pneumatic cylinder's piston. The piston is alternately advanced and retracted by alternately exposing the top surface or the bottom surface of the piston to compressed gas. While Elder, Jr. allows a golfer to automatically re-tee tee successive golf balls without the golfer having to change their stance, the height to which the golf ball is teed in the Elder, Jr. machine is not easily adjustable without undergoing a cumbersome process involving screw drivers or the like. Elder, Jr. also suffers from the drawback of not showing any means for preventing the machine from jamming or otherwise misloading when the piston is retracted to load a successive golf ball.
The present invention is intended to overcome these and other problems associated with automatic golf ball teeing machines of the prior art.